Re: [Lnx-bbc-devel] Re: site FAQ - question missing...

>>> John Kodis <[email protected]> 07/29/03 06:25PM >>>
>Yes, that would be a big help, as long as you're not in a situation
>where you need the man page for route to figure out how to get your
>network working.

>BTW, do you know about how much space the man pages take up, or how to
>build a (admittedly oversized) BBC image that includes all the man
>pages? I'm curious about how many applications would have to be
>dropped to make room.

It depends alot on what you call "man pages". When I first ran into
the lnx-bbc, man pages wereone of my first suggestions. (As sounds
like happenedthis time, the "I'm agod and know everything, and
anybody who's not shouldn't be using this" crowd shot it down.)

I took the man pages from my RedHat system of the time. I ran them
through the appropriate programs (such as groff) to get readable text,
and then tarred them up, using a high level of compression. It ended
up being somewhere between 1.5 and 2 MBs.

I just looked at /usr/share/man/man1 on my current RedHat machine,
and it takes about 8 MB. (All the individual pages are compressed as
separate files, and they still have all the formatting stuff.)

If there are a 1000 program on the current bbc and you want a full-blown
manpage for every one, it would probably be 15-20 MB, even with the
highest compression.

A hand-written set of manpages, tailored to the bbc and sacrificing some
of the format flexibility that ordinary manpages have for economy of space
might only take two or three meg. (Actually, you could probably make any
target you cared to pick, down to three or four K.) This method has one
huge drawback, though - it's pretty labor-intensive.

I was willing to do a lot in this area, but the powers-that-be on the project
made it very clear that man pages weren't going to be included no matter
how small they were nor how useful they might be to non-gods, so I
dropped it.